Blog: Culture-Heroism in Vergil’s Eclogue 5 and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

Xander Tyska explores allusions to Vergil in Cormac McCarthy’s work as a reflection upon the moral ambiguity of “culture-heroes” and the very act of discovery.

The late Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 Blood Meridian: Or, The Evening Redness in the West is one of the most powerful and horrifying works of American literature. The novel describes the violent progress of an unnamed protagonist known as “the kid” as he engages in the slaughter of the indigenous people of the American Southwest of 1848–50 with a gang of genocidal “scalp-hunters” led by John Joel Glanton. Not for the faint of heart, Blood Meridian is a searing indictment of the bloody consequences of European colonialism in the United States and Mexico.

Central to the narrative and its critics is the unsettling figure of Judge Holden, a “seven-foot-tall, hairless, albino, sinister, pedophiliac” man of paradoxically terrifying charisma, intellect, and brutality beyond reckoning. For classicists, I think that the judge’s engagement with the ideas of Greek poets and philosophers opens a portal to the novel’s indirect allusions to ancient Mediterranean literature and thought. Indeed, the relationship between Blood Meridian, pre-Socratic Greek philosophy in general, and the judge in particular has been aptly discussed. However, beyond this point of comparison, one of the most memorable anecdotes about the judge contains an indirect allusion to the world of Latin Pastoral, and specifically, to Vergil’s Eclogue 5. In chapter ten of the novel, a member of the Glanton gang, the “expriest” Tobin narrates to the kid how Glanton and his gang first encountered the judge when he was marooned in the desert. On the judge’s rifle is inscribed a famous Latin phrase: et in Arcadia ego, “and even I [am] in Arcadia:”

“He had with him that selfsame rifle you see with him now, all mounted in german silver and the name that he’d give it set with silver wire under the checkpiece in latin: Et In Arcadia Ego. A reference to the lethal in it. Common enough for a man to name his gun. I’ve heard Sweetlips and Hark From The Tombs and every sort of lady’s name. His is the first and only ever I seen with an inscription from the classics."

From Tobin’s account, it is first suggested that we are to understand the phrase as a possible reference to paintings by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) and Guercino (1591–1666), which depict mysterious scenes of memento mori (the reminder that everyone is going to die) in the environs of pastoral Arcadia. Mary Beard and John Henderson give a good overview of this phrase in their Oxford Very Short Introduction to Classics. Hence, “[a] reference to the lethal in it.” But the expriest also seems to be under the impression, perhaps because of the judge’s manifest learning, that the quotation comes from a classical text, because of the marked contrast between the enigmatic Latin phrase and the more vulgar names bestowed by other gunmen on their weapons.

The remarkable occurrence of this famous Latin phrase in McCarthy’s novel made me revisit Eclogue 5, the poem which is generally cited as its indirect source.

I believe we can make these two texts speak to each other by focusing our attention on the figure of the technological culture-hero, and its innate moral ambiguity. In antiquity, certain gods and heroes were worshipped for introducing benefits to humankind, such as Hercules, who rid the earth of monsters, making it ready for human habitation, and Bacchus, who introduced the gift of wine. In Eclogue 5, Daphnis can be understood to represent a more peaceful version of this paradigm, in contrast to the iuvenis or “young man” (the Roman statesman Octavian, soon to become the emperor Augustus) of Eclogue 1, who establishes peace through war in Arcadia. Mopsus’ eulogy celebrating the deceased Daphnis tells us that he taught (Verg. Ecl. 5.30, instituit) humankind to yoke tigers to chariots and to celebrate the rites of Bacchus (5.29–44). For benefiting the world in ways that potentially involve violence (e.g. domesticating animals, drunkenness), but which are contradistinct from warfare, Daphnis is revered as a god. Even the natural world itself celebrates him (5.62–64). This point goes further, considering how Vergil uses the same language to describe Daphnis as Lucretius does in his De rerum natura to describe his own culture-hero, the philosopher Epicurus, who introduced peace of mind through philosophy to human beings (5.1–54).

This peace-establishing paradigm of culture-heroism has a counterexample in McCarthy’s judge. He uses technology to sustain war. That the judge’s rifle is inscribed with “Et In Arcadia Ego” anticipates, to some degree, the climax of Tobin’s narrative, which also involves the technology of the firearm. Whereas the judge’s rifle is a refined product of human craft, the judge accomplishes something so shocking that it seems to mimic a primordial moment of warlike, rather than peaceful, culture-heroism: the discovery of gunpowder. Stranded in the desert, pursued by Apache warriors, and out of powder to charge their weapons, the Glanton gang seems on the brink of annihilation. In one episode, the judge and the gang members acquire “cave dirt” or “nitre” (sc. bat feces). Then, after utilizing a makeshift kiln, the judge produces eight pounds of saltpeter and three pounds of charcoal (133–134). After collecting these items, the company fortifies itself in the cone of a dormant volcano. Having acquired two pounds of sulfur from the adjacent brimstone, Tobin describes a grotesque moment of sardonic desperation (137–138). The judge orders the gang to “piss” into the elemental “matrix” (138). The repulsive chemical ritual succeeds. The gang charges their weapons with the foul mixture, now dried and revealed to be the sought-after gunpowder, and successfully ambushes their Apache pursuers. They thus survive to continue their genocidal campaign against the desert’s indigenous people.

What does urinating in the raw matter of gunpowder have to do with Daphnis in Vergil’s Eclogue 5? Daphnis introduced, for the first time, benedictions to humanity––namely, the yoking of tigers to chariots, and the delights of Bacchic revelries. Yoking tigers is a violent act, but one which produces peace through domestication. Wine can produce violent uproar and calming lethargy in equal measure, but it is an overall boon for humankind. So Mopsus praises Daphnis for taming wild beasts and bringing good cheer to a pacified rural environment. Of course, gunpowder already exists in the world of Blood Meridian. But the judge’s near-supernatural ability to conjure the raw materials necessary for its production gives the impression that the successful production of the powder is so unexpected as to be phenomenologically equivalent to the original discovery of the lethal mixture. The episode on the rim of the volcano is essentially a recreation of a “what if”: what if a culture-hero, of a character contrary to Vergil’s Daphnis, and certainly to Lucretius’ Epicurus, obtained the prerequisite knowledge for the production of gunpowder, and produced it suddenly, thus obtaining salvation for his comrades, and destruction for his enemies? The gunpowder episode in Blood Meridian thus illustrates how the judge embodies a violent example of the culture-hero paradigm; he brings salvation through violence and thus menaces the “Arcadia” of the Mexican desert. The macabre Latin inscription on the judge’s rifle is disturbingly aligned with its brutal purpose. Fittingly, he later pronounces in a Heraclitean sermon that “god is war” (249).

For me, reading these two texts together serves as a cautionary reminder of a grimness and bizarreness characteristic of McCarthy’s horrifying but profound writing, that technological prowess is fundamentally ambiguous and equally capable of producing war and peace, life and death, and joy and misery out of nothing.